The Nation State and Beyond, 2013 Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context Series

The history of globalization is anything but a no-frills affair that moves smoothly along a clear-cut, unidirectional path of development, eventually leading to seamless global integration. Accordingly, scholarship in the social sciences has increasingly argued against equating the history of globalization processes and transcultural entanglements with the master narrative of the gradual homogenization of the world. Examining the shifting patterns of global connections has, therefore, become the main challenge for all those who seek to understand the past, the present and the future of modern societies. And this challenge includes finding a place for the nation state. The studies presented here argue that looking at the nation state from the perspective of global entanglements opens the door for its interpretation as a dynamic and multi-layered structure that takes part in globalization processes and plays various and at times even contradictory roles at the same time.

Examines the role of state and non-state actors in historical globalization on the basis of hands-on empirical research Illustrates the theoretical discussion on the concept of globalization with numerous empirical examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Applies an actor-centred approach that reveals the many overlapping layers of globalization Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras